Chirls: Large VC firms operate like transactional Wall Street banks
Nicholas Chirls · Nicholas Chirls: Why Big VCs Ruin Startups, VC is a Ponzi Scheme Today & Most VCs are Bankers |E1198 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Sep 6, 2024 · at 3:04
Nicholas Chirls, founder of Asylum Ventures and former Lehman Brothers analyst, criticizes the shift in culture among large multi-stage VC firms.
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“Basically all the same people from Lehman showed up. Highly transactional, all about the money. There was no real art or creativity to it. It was very private equity, like finding the company, dressing it up a little bit, handing it off to the next guy. And I was about as unhappy as I was in 2021, as I was working at Lehman Brothers in 2007. The big firms have gotten huge. They have gigantic AOMs, as you know, and so we now internally at Asylum, we call them the big banks. Not all that different than Lehman and Goldman and the others back in the day.”
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